Margot Robbie in her movie stealing role as Suicide Squad’s Harley Quinn

And it’s worth noting that her name gets top billing for both, too.

First up is The Legend of Tarzan, in cinemas now, where she plays Jane to Alexander Skarsgård’s titular monkey-man. Then on August 5 comes the most hotly anticipated release of the summer.

Suicide Squad is the latest DC Comics superhero flick – but with a huge difference.

The hook is that our heroes here are actually super-villains… and the baddest of them all is Robbie’s Harley Quinn, a pigtailed, hot-pant-wearing, baseball-bat-wielding former psychiatrist and full-on psychopath.

It is, as they say, a dream role. So is she excited about it?

“Yes!” Robbie laughs. “But I’m also very nervous, too. I don’t want to disappoint because there are a lot of people talking about the film and the role of Harley – I want to do her justice.

“But I love that nobody else has played her yet, and I don’t know why because she is the raddest role out there. She’s creepy, she’s crazy, she’s so badass, and I love playing the badass. It’s so empowering.”

Although she’s sharing the screen with a host of big Hollywood names – including Will Smith as assassin Deadshot and Jared Leto as The Joker – Suicide Squad belongs to Harley Quinn. And Robbie knows it.

“It’s the first time I’ve really felt that I had the best character in all the movies I’ve ever done,” she says.

“Although I’ve been fortunate to get to play some great roles, Harley is striking and so nuts that you’re constantly on edge – you don’t have any idea what she’s going to do next.

“She’s dangerous and deceptive, and one of the best things about her is that [writer and director] David Ayer made her the central figure in the film.

“You rarely see a woman get to be the main character in a story where most of the roles are played by guys. Normally the girl in a film this big would be a supporting character. So this is pretty special.”

Still just 26 years old, Robbie does seem to have arrived out of nowhere to become one of Hollywood’s hottest names. But the truth is, the girl from Australia’s Gold Coast has worked hard for this – even if, with typical Aussie nonchalance, she downplays it.

Ask her how people reacted when she first said she wanted to be an actor, for → example, and you can almost hear the shrug and grin in her voice.

“Everyone was like: ‘What are you talking about?’” she says. “Because where I’m from, it’s just not a thing that anyone really strives for. It’s not a feasible career choice. It was a joke. People were like: ‘OK, you get this out of your system. You know, wait till you can’t afford to eat and there’s no roof over your head, you’ll wise up.’

“And I kind of agreed with them to a certain extent. So when it started happening, I was as shocked as everyone else.”

A series of roles in low-budget local films in her teens eventually led to her moving to Melbourne in 2007, when she was just 17. There, she juggled three jobs around attending countless auditions.

Robbie’s big break, when it happened, came in 2008 through that most tried-and-tested Antipodean talent factory – the same soap vehicle that gave us Kylie Minogue, Liam Hemsworth, Guy Pearce and even a young Russell Crowe, among many.

“I learned so much from my three years on Neighbours,” she says. “I learned from really early on about discipline, professionalism and working to a fast deadline. Those qualities in this game are precious. And I gained a lot from watching myself.”

Neighbours also gave her the confidence and the impetus to leave Australia and have a shot at Hollywood. It’s typical of Robbie that she didn’t agonise over the decision, but rather jumped in head first.

Almost immediately after arriving in Los Angeles in 2011, she landed a role in the TV series Pan Am alongside Christina Ricci.

Although loved by critics, the show was dropped after a single season – but not before Robbie had caught the attention of legendary director Martin Scorsese.

Margot played an air hostess alongside Christina Ricci in the US show Pan Am

Since then, there has been The Wolf of Wall Street, Focus with Will Smith, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot alongside Tina Fey and Martin Freeman, a BAFTA Rising Star nomination, a Calvin Klein deal… So life has been a bit of a whirlwind, right?

“It might seem that way, but to me it’s taken a long time in preparation for everything that’s happening now,” she says.

“I started out on the worst low-budget kind of film back in Australia that you could ever imagine. Neighbours gave me the experience and confidence I needed to be able to move to LA and see if I could make my way over there.

A red carpet regular, Margot shines at the 2016 Costume Institute Gala in New York

“Then Pan Am came along, and even though I was crushed when it was cancelled, I never would have been able to do The Wolf of Wall Street if the series had continued.

“Every time I think about that, it makes me think how lucky I’ve been and how you never really know how things are going to work out for you.”

Beautiful, talented, hard-working, grounded… Robbie is as refreshing off-screen as she is electric on it. And she also seems determined to shake up the way Hollywood traditionally showcases its leading ladies.

Sure, Harley Quinn is undoubtedly the “baddest, raddest” superhero we’ve had in a while. But Robbie also brings an edge to more conventionally second-fiddle females.

In The Wolf of Wall Street, she was every bit a match for Leonardo DiCaprio’s scheming Jordan Belfort.

And in The Legend of Tarzan, she takes one of cinema’s most traditionally submissive characters and gives her a bit of good old Aussie spunk.

“I know, I would have been the same: ‘Are you living in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills now? Are you having loads of Botox?’

But it’s still the same, I live in the same part of London, and yeah, there’s glitzy stuff like premieres and awards, which I always thought would be cool to go to. Now I do [go], and I appreciate it so much.

“But other than that, it’s all still very much the same. There are only a couple of days a year where it feels like: ‘Wow, what’s going on?’ when you’re doing press and travelling for premieres or going to the Oscars, but after that, you’re either working, hanging out with your friends or going to Tesco.